Forum adverts like this one are shown to any user who is not logged in. Join us by filling out a tiny 3 field form and you will get your own, free, dakka user account which gives a good range of benefits to you: No adverts like this in the forums anymore. Times and dates in your local timezone. Full tracking of what you have read so you can skip to your first unread post, easily see what has changed since you last logged in, and easily see what is new at a glance. Email notifications for threads you want to watch closely. Being a part of the oldest wargaming community on the net. If you are already a member then feel free to login now.

I have a question to ask you guys.

Given how game design requires a lot of designing, thinking, and fine-tuning through playtesting, I wanted to get some thoughts from you who have browsed the Game Design subforum.

Just how popular is a game subtype to a specific audience? A game subtype that I specifically mention would have to be: campaign, skirmish, team battle, FFA battle, adversarial battle. I'll list them.

Campaign: a string of multiple battles to make up an overall story arc, determining the victorious faction as the victor or alternating a storyline that may veer from canon sources.

Skirmish: a small-scale skirmish of a number of models on the battlefield are deployed and played through to the finish.

Team Battle: a battle of teams versus teams, where teams group together with their models and attack others.

FFA Battle: a battle where every player attacks everyone else in order to become the last man standing.

Adversarial battle: a battle where two players attack each other and vie for the top coveted position of "whatever this must be".

Personally, I have written up my rulebook with the concept of a campaign in mind, but have allowed adversarial battles, FFA battles to be included. Not only that, RPG elements of upgrading your pilots, granting them newer vehicles (which may require expansions of newer minis), and eventually granting them more ranks in order to lead lesser ones into battle. I wanted to figure out just what makes a wargame interesting, depending on the game subtype it picks.

Is there really a fine-line to adding too much, or too little?

It is more based on the business plan and sticking with it, there are companies who did skirmish and failed because they expected people to buy more than they needed or were overoptimistic about their line and others who manage to survive with a skirmish format more than a decade.

Lets go to a more pragmatic viewpoint, most players have a main game and this is usually a GW, but the other small companies have a gained a foothold game absorbing most of their time and money, this means the game you design will be fighting for second or third place at best, in this situation needing fewer models to play is a key factor in purchasing the game along with design and background (regardless of the advice you will get compatibility with GW is a bad thing, too many companies not burdened with a game design and background already fill that spot).

So skirmish game is an essential element, in this format you need variety to keep the players intrigued in your game so plan ahead with this in mind, but, if you plan on working with game stores be careful of SKUs too many SKUs make the game unattractive for gamestores (you can possibly design a point were SKUs can be consolidated if you are successful).

The difficult question is campaign or game balance, both are almost mutually exclusive and both have a strong demand if you go campaign you will need to design units with upgrades in mind so you can give variety with different equipment and skill combinations, if you go for game balance the equipment and skills will need to be fixed so you will have to go with units variety.

FFA is really difficult to design and implement especially in stopping the other players ganging up on one player then the next until it turns to a 2 player game and team battle is something the players will house-rule eventually in your system so if it proves time consuming you can/ should skip it, if a good solution turns up from play-testers/ early adopters you can implement it later.

I would like some explanation on adversarial battle, how is this different from a normal game?

From a practical point of view rules that are good for single games between two players will sell better than rules for ongoing campaigns or multiplayer games. Getting sufficient interest in a game to consistently organize several people at once or keep people committed to an ongoing campaign is much harder than getting at least one other person to show up for a game one afternoon. And playing a less than ideal game is much more fun than sitting around thinking about how nice it would be if anyone else wanted to play your perfect game.